Author: Steve Bowbrick

The Economist on migration

I’ve just finished reading The Economist’s blockbuster survey on migration. More very good work developing the newspaper’s line on the liberalisation of migration as a benefit to both nations (receiving and sending) and peoples (likewise). As I have said before (in August and in September), this issue is more important than we think and we allow the politicians to hijack it to meet their short-term (very short-term in this context) needs at our peril. Europe’s population is about to enter a very long decline. Even the new entrants from the East cannot slow the long term fall since their birth rates are already too low. Meanwhile, the only Western nation bucking the trend, the USA, could easily have 500 million inhabitants by mid-century. The economic implications are obvious.

While the USA and the emerging economies grow strongly, slow-growth Europe can only fall further and further behind. You don’t need to share The Economist’s free trader stance to recognise the stark stupidity of turning away willing, young workers at the border while our economies stagnate. We can only hope that the penny drops for European Governments before the current flow of eager migrants has lost interest and moved on to more attractive destinations. Reversing a nation’s (or an entire economic bloc’s) stance on immigration is not easy with the emotional stakes so high but the implications of getting it wrong – a shrinking and ever-more-irrelevant European economy – are too grim to contemplate.

Architects and housing

The orthodoxy is that the last time professional architects were allowed to design housing on a large scale in Britain they did more damage than the blitz, snuffing out historic street patterns and fracturing communities in their fervour to ‘improve the lives’ of the poor.

But experts (demographers, mostly) tell us we’re going to need 3.8 million new homes in the next couple of decades. Old people and single person households are to blame. We’re currently replacing our housing stock so slowly that every house that’s currently standing will need to keep doing so for about 1,000 years to cope even with current demand. We need those architects.

An exhibition at the RIBA shows a dozen or so medium-to-large housing projects designed by a new breed of ‘architect-planners’, people sensitive to social and human context as well as to the purity of form. Keywords for the projects on show are ‘sustainable’, ‘flexible’, ‘self-organising’, ‘human scale’.

The signs are encouraging: there’s nothing programmatic, ideological or arrogant about these schemes – although inevitably much that is fashionable. Mistakes will still be made but in this more modestly-scaled work, they should be self-limiting. Feedback loops will be short enough to encourage constant revision of the master plan and prevent the decades of blight that overcame the huge post-war housing estates.

Some projects are even flexible enough to be continuously reworked in response to new demands – walls can be erected to add rooms as kids arrive, a lift punched through the ceiling as occupants age and can’t use the stairs – all without planning permission or a structural engineer.

A new house building boom is about to begin and, on the strength of this exhibition, it might turn out to be a renaissance for the professionals.

Break up BT?

Last night I spoke at the launch of Demos’ latest report ‘The Politics of Broadband’. The authors have been bold in their conclusions (and perhaps incautious in their choice of sponsor) but we should expect that of a Think Tank whose average age seems to be about 19 (I make this observation because I am old and bitter). They’ve absorbed all the latest thinking from the US – Lessig, Open Spectrum, the ‘Innovation Commons’ and they want Government to get on and break up BT to dissolve the innovation log jam and get broadband roll-out moving. From the platform, Stephen Timms was nicer about this idea than I’d expected of the ecommerce minister (but it’s still a ‘no’) and Graham Wallace, who runs Cable & Wireless (the incautiously chosen sponsor), made a good case for the break-up (but then he would, wouldn’t he).

From the floor, Clare Spottiswoode, who, in an earlier life, split up Gas supply for the last Tory Government, couldn’t understand why it would be any more complicated to split up BT than British Gas and pointed to the wave of innovation and price cuts that followed that break-up. Wallace went further and argued that it would be ‘easy’ to split up the giant incumbent because of the elaborate system of interconnect agreements already in place at the telephone exchanges.

There was no consensus. Robin Mansell, Professor of New Media & The Internet at the LSE, was against – too complicated and disruptive by far. The most cogent argument against came from Claire Enders: the capital markets will have the casting vote, since they’ll have to fund the break-up, and they’re still on strike so we might as well forget it. I think it’s unwise to bet on apocalyptic infrastructural change to help us get Broadband Britain rolling while the tech and comms economy is still deep frozen. We’re going to need to be more tactical and less scornful of ‘incremental change’.

Information about energy

Matt Jones has been worrying about information and energy lately. Here are some energy links for him. According to New Scientist (you can get a free 7 day trial for the NS archives or, if you subscribe to the magazine there’s no charge) Eric Schneider and James Kay think the biologists (and the rest of us, for that matter) have got it wrong about life. We’re not here to reproduce, we’re here to tear up energy, to accelerate the rate of increase of disorder. All of life is just a big entropy machine. This sounds like one of those ideas that’ll be orthodoxy in twenty years. Meanwhile, also from New Scientist, chemical physicists in Australia have shown that, at micron scales and over periods of time as long as a couple of seconds, the second law works in reverse. Blimey.

Fireworks therapy

So after two or three hours running up and down the garden in the fine drizzle, lighting fireworks of every variety (including some fucking enormous roman candle bundles about the size of a fire bucket), I can confirm that my favourite is the Angry Wasps Mine from Standard Fireworks. It produces a gorgeous fountain of multi-coloured sparks for about 30 seconds and then stops… for just long enough to convince you that it’s all over. The bang that follows is awesome – the percussion, even from the the other end of the garden, where you are cowering, is startling – a big shove in the chest that leaves everyone laughing and grinning like fools. Speaking as your doctor, I suggest you get a big box of these things and keep them handy for those difficult days…

edemocracy spiked!

Spiked is run by the survivors of Living Marxism magazine, the high profile and often entertaining voice of the British Revolutionary Communist Party during the nineties. The magazine was finally steam-rollered by a law suit in 2000 but these guys were always more switched on than the rest of the factional hard left so it’s no surprise to see them back with a stylish, readable web site and now a series of debates on the entirely relevant theme of IT after the crash.

Spiked’s mission is the debunking of trendy ideas – in politics, science, business, anywhere really. But this is really just classical entryism – a subtle and accessible way of doing the important work of blowing away our ‘false consciousness’ and reasserting the eternal oppositions of the class struggle – labour vs capital, state vs individual etc. (I can’t find a trace of the political party itself. Was it wound up? Surely it can’t be this lot?).

I guess the logic of the project is that debunking is infectious: for every orthodoxy persuasively overturned there is a potential convert to the larger cause. There really is nothing so satisfying as a cogently argued rubbishing of the status quo – whether it be climate change (it’s not happening), edemocracy (it’s just more state coercion) or testicular cancer (it’s no big deal).

As a strategy it’s obviously working. If tonight’s meeting was anything to go by, they’re frequented by plenty of non RCP people, many of whom may have no idea what Spiked stands for and little or no sympathy with their goals (like me). More subtle still, with no actual political party to push, Spiked can rightly claim to be entirely independent and new recruits are recruits to a way of thinking rather than to a political creed. Very postmodern.

In this debate, Charlie Leadbeater, advisor to number 10 and prominent optimist, argued that informal, self-organising digital networks (like this blogging thing) might present a way of holding governments and trans-national institutions to account. Influential forecaster James Woodhuysen, for Spiked, disagreed – entertaingly, as always. edemocracy is phoney – worse, it’s a barely disguised attempt to reinforce state control, provide new channels for coercion and permit governments to steamroller dissent. All of this communication is just a smokescreen, a clever distraction from the real business (in ‘the real world’) of production – substituting participation for real power. This programmatic emphasis of production over communication (content over form, real over imaginary) is sooo last century and, obviously, neglects the actual, objective reality of networked communications, though. Communication in the 21st Century is production.

The downtown music scene after 9/11

I sometimes listen to Radio 3’s Mixing It. Freaky stuff from every corner of music and only occasionally a bit po-faced. This week I stumbled across a web page about their visit to NYC in August 2002. They recorded a one-off programme with members of the downtown music scene, many of whom lived and worked within a few blocks of the WTC – Sonic Youth in Murray Street, Laurie Anderson in Greenwich Street, for instance. The programme is excellent – you can listen to it in Real Audio. Some of the artists interviewed have obviously had their worlds turned upside down by the event. Others do that amazing thing that only artists and egomaniacs can do – coming through a world-changing trauma, worldview, prejudices and ego intact – “yeah. It was a nightmare. And now I’m mostly working with tabla and tape loops…”

What passes for entertainment round my way

If you time it carefully and the whole thing hasn’t been washed into the river by the already torrential rainstorm here in the burbs, you might catch our garden fireworks live on the Shedcam from 1730 – 1900-ish this evening. I’ve upped the timing on the cam and pointed it out the shed window. I guess actually catching a burst on the cam would be a one-in-a-million chance but I don’t suppose you’ve got anything better to do this evening have you?

Detritus of fireworks night in a suburban garden
Afterwards